The Big Gundown

by Bill Brooks

  DAKOTA LAWMAN

  THE BIG GUNDOWN

  BILL BROOKS

  For Charles Price,

  Writer, Friend

  Contents

  Prologue

  THEY DROWNED THE BOY AT NOON.

  1

  THE WAY THEY FOUND NAT PICKETT was they’d been hunting…

  2

  JOHN SAID, “I KNOW THIS BOY.”

  3

  SOME ARE JUST BORN WITH A GIFT.

  4

  BOB PARKER WAS LARGE and thick as a slab of…

  5

  SNOW SEVERAL INCHES DEEP lay over everything. Dawn broke cold…

  6

  “I WATCHED YOU OUTSHOOT the Englishman today,” Shaw said. The…

  7

  “NOW, WHERE YOU THINK that peckerwood’s really going?” Dallas said…

  8

  JOHNNY ST. JOHN WAS A BOUNTY MAN and he’d been…

  9

  IT WAS A MILE, more or less, to the place.

  10

  WILLY SILK THOUGHT, If I’m gone kill a man, maybe…

  11

  HE WAS SURE THAT DALLAS and a few of the…

  12

  THEY WERE WAITING FOR HIM when he returned from town.

  13

  DALLAS AND PERK AND THE OTHERS were drinking in the…

  14

  MORNING SUN FILLED THE WINDOW and fell into the room…

  15

  DRUNK, WILLY SILK WAS unceremoniously dumped from the afternoon stage…

  16

  THE FLESH OF ELLIS KANSAS had become putrid. Jake took…

  17

  THE BUNKHOUSE WAS LONG and low-slung, made of logs dragged…

  18

  JAKE WAS THERE IN THE SALOON when the commotion began.

  19

  HE SAID, “I COME TO SEE HER.”

  20

  JAKE AWOKE TO THE SMELL of frying bacon, coffee, and…

  21

  FRISCO DROVE THE WAGON. Marybeth and the infant rode on…

  22

  WILLY SILK LAY WONDERING about the prospects of death, something…

  23

  BOB PARKER WAS SITTING AT THE TABLE, waiting for his…

  24

  JAKE WAS STILL AT CLARA’S when the evening came. Willy…

  25

  TIG WAS STANDING AT THE BAR, down at the end…

  26

  THEY REINED IN at the Three Aces and dismounted stiffly.

  27

  JAKE ANSWERED THE KNOCK. He half-expected it.

  28

  FOR WHAT SEEMED like the longest time, there was just…

  About the Author

  Other Books by Bill Brooks

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  THEY DROWNED THE BOY AT NOON.

  They trussed him up with rope and fence wire.

  He struggled against them, but they were too many and too strong and they dragged him down off the back of the wagon and toward the creek.

  He could smell the water before he could see it. Old water, ancient like time itself running through the cut-banks, a thick vein of brown blood it seemed like. They dragged him near to the edge that dropped off down to the creek where it was deepest, where the water had cut a deep hole that even in the summer when the water was less, it was still deep enough a man couldn’t see down into.

  “No! No!” he cried through swollen and broken lips. They had beat him severely.

  One of them pulled his pistol, cocked and aimed it, brought the barrel close to the boy’s dark sweaty face.

  “You want me to shoot you, nigger? You want me to blow your brains out?”

  “You gone kill me, do it quick,” he cried.

  The man brought the pistol barrel down hard across his face and it stung like a whip, like a razor slashing him. His legs gave out and they pulled him up again. They forced him to look down into the water. He could see their shadowy figures in it, wavering like ghosts it seemed. The water looked cold, brooding and forbidding.

  He could see where the water eddied around old tree stumps that had floated down from upstream some time or other. Just across on the opposite side a large branch lay snagged, the water working around it, catching, then moving on.

  They cursed and slapped him across the face with their hats and when his legs gave out again, two of them took hold of him by the ankles and another by the neck and lifted him.

  The man with the gun said, “Tie the end of that rope around his neck.” The rope was wove out of horsehair and one end of it was knotted around an anvil they’d brought along, one of them carrying it from the wagon bed in his arms as he might a lost calf, straining under its weight.

  They laid him upon the ground and kneeled on him so he couldn’t rise up while one of them took the end of the rope, tied to the anvil, and wrapped it around his neck. The one with the pistol said, “Tie it up short, I don’t want him floating like a snagged fish. I want him down under there.”

  They wore hoods made out of feed sacks with holes cut out for their eyes. He could see the whites of their eyes sometimes when the hoods shifted. He wondered why they’d hid their faces. He knew every one of them from their voices, and one by the boots he wore because of a pattern stitched into the shanks: a rose.

  He’d worked alongside them, cutting hay, bailing it, herding cattle from one ground to another, branding them, castrating them, building line shacks, and putting a new roof on the bunkhouse where they all slept as hired hands. He’d played cards with them and drank some with them in town. He didn’t understand why they were trying to hide their faces. It scared him more that they had.

  The man tying the rope snugged it up tight around his neck without saying anything, but he was breathing hard.

  “Why you doing this?” he said.

  The man with the pistol leaned down so close he could smell the stink of whiskey and smoked tobacco on his breath. He tested the knot around the boy’s neck, made sure it was a good one. Said, “Goddamn nigger. Don’t tell me you don’t know why. Don’t insult my good intelligence or I’ll gouge out your eyes with my thumbs before I toss you in that creek. You’ll die without any eyes to see your maker.”

  Then the man balled his fist and smashed it against his nose, breaking it, and he could taste the warm salt of his blood leaking into the back of his throat. His left eye was swollen nearly closed from where they’d punched him almost senseless before tossing him in the back of the wagon. And one of them had struck him on the ear with something, a rock maybe, and it hurt worse than anything else, like something had bit it. He couldn’t hear out of that side of his head.

  “She was a decent gal till you got holt of her,” the man with the pistol said, his face still down close. “Nobody’ll want her now.”

  He started to speak, but the man smashed him in the mouth with his fist again, like he enjoyed doing it, like it gave him the greatest pleasure. A tooth fell into his mouth and he spit it out with some of the blood and it splattered on the man’s stitched rose boots and he cursed him again for doing it.

  “Lift him up, boys,” the man ordered.

  Three of them got him up in the air while the other lifted up the anvil and they shuffled him over to the very edge of the bank again where it dropped off about four or five feet to the water below.

  “This is the right spot,” the man with the pistol said. “That’s a deep hole right there and that is where he’ll settle, at least till next summer when the water goes low again.”

  He wriggled and twisted against their greedy hands and got himself free momentarily and hit the ground hard, but they picked him up again and the rope went tight around his neck as the one with the anvil pulled a little on it, choking him.

  “
Toss him down into that goddamn hole, boys.”

  The fear shot through him so hard and mean he began to cry, snot and slobber leaking out of him, mixed with the blood, as they swung him back once, then out over the edge of the bank and released him. He fell free momentarily before the anvil’s weight caught and jerked him down.

  The water came up around him in a cold rush. His whole flesh shrank from its cold.

  He gasped for breath, but water rushed in as the anvil dragged him down. The water tasted foul, dirty, and he gagged on it, but when he did, more rushed in and he began to swallow, but he couldn’t swallow fast enough.

  Bolts of panic struck at his very heart, flooded his mind.

  My god, no! No! No!

  But there was no escape from it. The more he fought the more water rushed into him. His mind blurred. He swallowed and swallowed that dirty putrid water and at last it felt as though something were releasing him. He twisted like a caught fish. He opened his eyes once and saw inches away the strand of rope that held him tethered. Then the darkness came into him and took away his struggle, his fear, his panic. All the rest.

  The men on the bank watched as the bubbles rose to the surface, then were quickly swept away by the current. It reminded one of them of the bubbles a snapping turtle makes when it sets down on the bottom. They stood in silence, the wind whipping at their clothes, and one of them took off his hood and held it in his hand and the others did the same. The immediate violence had passed out of them and now their bodies had gone slack in the watching. They had turned into spectators of their own crime.

  They waited four or five minutes, watching the place where they’d thrown the boy into the water, waiting to see if the anvil held.

  “Maybe that current’ll carry him downstream,” one of them said.

  “No, he ain’t gone nowhere with that chunk of iron anchoring him down.”

  Then the oddest thing: The boy’s boots floated up and they could see the lower half of his legs where the cuffs had pulled down, the bare brown calves.

  “Shit,” the man with the pistol said. “His whole bottom half is floated up. That anvil’s got his top half weighed down, but not his legs.”

  They stood there wondering what they should do about this situation.

  One of them tried poking at the legs with the barrel of a rifle he’d gone and gotten out from under the seat of the wagon, but it was too far a drop to effectively do anything.

  “Somebody’ll for sure come along and see him in there,” one of them said—the one who’d carried the anvil. “They’ll pretty much know who did it, seeing as how—”

  “Shut the goddamn hell up,” the man with the pistol said.

  The boy’s legs and boots bobbing on the surface would get pulled under, then resurface, the current tugging at them, then releasing them, again and again. The men were uncertain about what to do.

  His name was Nat Pickett and his daddy had brought him west from Alabama to Oklahoma, where he first learned to cowboy and had a handsome way with horses. By the age of fourteen he was riding drag on a cattle drive that took him north into Kansas, where he got drunk for the first time and lost his virginity to a colored prostitute in a Hays bordello and once saw Wild Bill disarm two Union soldiers.

  He drifted always north, refusing to return to Oklahoma until he could go back with more than what he’d left there with. He thought he might like to own his own cattle company someday, get married, have children, and ultimately become a well-respected citizen in a town of his choosing.

  The white girl had not been part of the plan.

  Now it was too late.

  “Well, ain’t nothing we can do about it now,” the man with the pistol said. “Not one goddamn thing. What’s done is done and if someone was to find him now, or later, it won’t make a shit bit of difference, now, will it. And if they want to lay blame, then let them try. For we are all in this together. Ain’t nobody gone to blame one of us for doing what we did once they know the story. What that nigger boy did was a sin and a crime and all we did was do what the law would have. They’d hang him and he’d be just as dead as he is now. We just saved them all the trouble. And if that don’t wash, then by god I guess we’ll go to fighting with whoever it is wanting to pick a fight over what he did and what we did.”

  Nobody else said anything and they went and mounted their horses and the one who’d carried the anvil climbed up into the wagon seat and took the reins of the gray hitched to it.

  The man with the pistol said, “I guess we’d be wise to keep this thing between ourselves. For one thing, I don’t know how old Parker would take it if he found out about this. I think that wife of his has turned him into a weak sister, hauling him to church ever Sunday. He might see it as bringing trouble down on his head he don’t want and cut us loose. So it’s best we just keep this thing to ourselves.”

  He looked at them each in the eyes and saw they were in agreement. Jobs were hard to come by that time of year, with winter about on them. They all knew it.

  “We best get on back,” the man with the pistol said.

  “What about these?” the man in the wagon said, holding up his feedsack hood.

  “Shit, I don’t guess we need them no more.”

  “You think he knew it was us,” asked the man in the wagon, tossing away his hood.

  “Who gives a damn did he know or not?”

  “I think he knew it was us. I don’t guess we even had to bother wearing them.”

  “’Cause of her,” the man said, tossing away his. “I dint want her to see our faces case she woke up, is why.”

  The man in the wagon nodded, then snapped the reins.

  “I could use a drink,” he said.

  “Hell, I guess ever one of us could,” said the man with the pistol.

  They rode on toward town without hurry.

  1

  THE WAY THEY FOUND NAT PICKETT was they’d been hunting for geese.

  Toussaint had invited Jake to go hunting with him.

  “Karen wants me to hunt her a goose for Thanksgiving,” he said. “And since she’s inviting you to dinner, I figure you might want to help me shoot one.”

  “It’s the first I heard about it, being invited to dinner,” Jake said.

  “Well, she told me to ask you. I figure two of us will stand a better chance of shooting a goose than if just one of us was to go.”

  “Goose, huh?”

  “Said it’s traditional in her family. She’s German, you know how they are. She wants to give the boy a nice traditional dinner, I guess me and you too. She’s over to Otis’s store right now buying the rest of the works, candied yams and that sort of thing. Says all she needs now is a nice fat goose.”

  “I don’t have a goose gun to shoot with,” Jake said.

  “Hell, I got a pair of shotguns.”

  “What time?”

  “Need to be there when it gets light—the place where the geese are. Meet me out to our place. We’ll follow up along the creek to a little lake where I think we might catch a few of those suckers napping.”

  “About dinner…” Jake said.

  “What about it?”

  “You think Karen would mind if I brought a friend or three?”

  The breed’s eyebrows arched.

  “Clara and her two girls,” Jake said.

  “Sure, bring ’em along. Little Stephen will be glad to have playmates.”

  “Okay then, tomorrow, your place, before daylight.”

  “A good hour or so before so we can make that little lake, be sitting there with our guns ready. They see us riding in, they’ll fly off. We have to be there waiting for ’em.”

  “That’s how you hunt them, huh?”

  Toussaint shrugged, said, “Hell, I guess, I never did hunt any; it’s just what I heard from some others who have hunted ’em.”

  “And if we don’t get lucky?”

  Toussaint looked toward the mercantile where his wife and stepson went.

  “Hell, the
n I guess we’ll feast on candied yams.”

  The next morning Jake rode through the black cold, the sky poked full of stars. That hour not even coyotes howled. Everything was asleep except for men wanting to go goose hunting.

  He was still thinking about the supper he’d had the night before at Clara Fallon’s house. Clara and her girls sitting around the table with him, talking amicably. He liked them all a lot, and being there with them like that caused him to feel halfway normal again. It didn’t take very much imagination to think of them all as family. Later, after Clara put the girls to bed, they sat and talked awhile longer. Then when he got up to put his coat on she stopped him, said, “Jake,” and he knew what she wanted and she must have known what he wanted too.

  “It’s terribly cold tonight,” she said. The wind had been bothering the windows all evening. They could hear it keening outside. It had a lonesome sound to it, like a train whistle or the howl of a lost wolf.

  “You want me to stay, Clara?” he said.

  She didn’t say anything but instead took him by the hand and led him to the back bedroom and set the lit lamp there by the bed and he watched her start to unbutton her dress.

  “I don’t want you to think this is something I’d do with just anybody,” she said. He liked how the light fell soft on her face, leaving some of it in shadows. He came and took her hands away and undid the buttons himself, slowly, allowing time for her to change her mind if she wanted.

  “I don’t think this is something you’d do with just anyone, Clara.”

  Her hands now free of the undressing stroked the sides of his face then brought it down closer to her own and their lips touched softly, as though they were old friends who’d not seen each other in a very long time. Their kiss was tentative at first, then they kissed again, their need more needy, and each time thereafter more still, even as his hands worked at the buttons, even as hers fell to raising his shirt over his head. As clothes dropped away, they found themselves in the most passionate of embraces. The lamplight flickered against the flocked wallpaper, causing their shadows to loom large until he reached over and turned down the wick and the light went out of the room and all that was left was just their breathing, their whispers to each other there in the darkness, their bodies entwined and falling to the bed. But he could still see her in his mind and she could see him.